Landlords who have tenants with rent arrears may wish to seek legal advice. OpenRent has legal partners who are happy to have a no-obligation phone call with OpenRent customers to discuss your options going forwards.
Legal action should be a last resort
Proceeding through court is nobody's idea of fun, it can be an expensive and time consuming process. So what's the alternative?
Can you resolve the situation amicably?
- Talk to your tenant to understand why they haven’t been able to pay yet and when they are likely to be able to.
- Make sure you agree a deadline/schedule in writing if you don’t intend to start eviction proceedings immediately.
- If they don’t meet the agreed time-frame, you can choose to agree a new one, but this risks increasing your exposure.
- If your tenant receives housing benefit, check if they could apply to the local authority for a Discretionary Housing Payment.
Eviction
If the tenant is in persistent rent arrears then, after taking the above steps as appropriate, you may wish to consider issuing an eviction notice.
If you need to end the tenancy within the fixed term and there is no break clause then you will have to rely on a Section 8 notice. There are three possible grounds that you can rely on if issuing a Section 8 notice for rent arrears, these are grounds 8, 10 and 11. Care should be taken when completing a Section 8 notice and we suggest that you take legal advice before going down this route.
A more straightforward option may be to issue a Section 21 notice. These notices can only be served to end a tenancy at the end of the fixed term or in accordance with a break clause. Our blog post explains how to do this in more detail here.
If you wish to issue a Section 21 notice, then you can use OpenRent’s online notice-serving tool. If the tenant does not leave after the notice period, then you will have to make a possession application to recover possession of the property.
Reclaiming money owed
- If you have Rent Guarantee Insurance, contact the insurer.
- Contact your deposit protection scheme to make a claim on the deposit.
- Contact the guarantor.
- If the tenancy has ended, then you can issue a claim through the money claims online portal for unpaid rent.
With regards to this last point: if you are successful, then the court will issue a judgement requiring the money to be paid within a set time frame. If you still do not receive the money, then there are various options to enforce the judgement, which include debt collection and having money deducted from their wages, as described in the above article.
Information on this site is by way of general guidance only and may not apply in your particular circumstances. You should not act or refrain from acting upon information on this site without seeking independent legal advice.
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